Lunar Lake unveiled: Intel strikes back with new laptop CPUs

If you’re wondering why you need Intel’s latest Core Ultra laptop processors, code-named Lunar Lake, the answer isn’t a simple one. But if you want to buy a Lunar Lake laptop, however, you’ll probably understand the differences between the various chips almost immediately.

Intel unveiled what it’s calling the Core Ultra Series 2 at a launch event in Berlin on Tuesday. In total, there are nine new Lunar Lake processors, which will begin shipping inside laptops from PC makers like Acer, Asus, HP, and Lenovo very soon: September 24. Preorders begin now.

A few months ago, Intel unveiled the guts of the new Lunar Lake architecture, offering a sneak peek into how much performance it will offer and how much power it will consume. Today we have a better idea: Intel is promising about a 30 percent improvement in terms of gaming over last year’s Meteor Lake chip, while consuming less power — with some hard numbers to back it up. That’s a nice one-two punch for those people who want longer-lasting laptops without giving up too much performance.

What you’ll probably appreciate, though, is a relative return to simplicity. For the last several years, simply describing a laptop processor meant trying to explain a tangled web of cores, threads, clock speeds, caches, and GPUs — with twists and tweaks all over the place.

Instead, all of the Lunar Lake chips begin with “2” to describe them. They all end in “V.” They all contain the same number of performance cores, efficiency cores, and threads. Jumping up to a faster Lunar Lake model number means adding 200MHz or so in clock speed, with a corresponding increase in GPU performance. That’s about it.

And yes, these new Core Ultra Lunar Lake chips are (mostly) qualified to be called Copilot+ PCs, with NPUs cresting 45 TOPS of AI performance and above. But Intel is taking a much less breathless, more realistic approach to AI than before.

Further reading: The best laptops for any budget

Intel’s Core Ultra (Series 2) Lunar Lake processors

Intel refused to call Meteor Lake a 14th-gen Core chip; in the same vein, Lunar Lake isn’t a 15th-gen Core chip, either. Instead, both chips are confined to the Core Ultra brand — though Intel isn’t really playing up the Core Ultra Series 2 moniker, either. Intel vice president Josh Newman, the general manager of product management, told reporters that Intel will still sell Meteor Lake chips to customers, leaving both Core Ultra chips in the market for now.

The new “V”-series designation is a new twist, too. Robert Hallock, a vice president in Intel’s Client Computing Group and general manager of AI marketing, said that the “V” designation was in response to customers who wanted a unique designation for Lunar Lake. You will eventually see familiar “S,” “U,” and “H”-series chips, on a “similar architecture, but different product,” Intel executives said, probably implying a version of the Arrow Lake chip that’s due sometime this fall, too.

All of the new Lunar Lake chips contain four P-cores and four E-cores, with the same number of threads for each. They’re differentiated in two ways: first, they either have 16GB or 32GB of DRAM, embedded right in the chip package themselves. But otherwise, they just have incremental improvements in CPU and GPU clock speed, up and down the stack — just like the way they used to be.

Naturally, Intel isn’t releasing the prices of the new Lunar Lake chips., as they’re sold directly to laptop makers. But Hallock said that the overarching principle was to offer partners and customers as close to the full capabilities of the Lunar Lake architecture to every customer, and let the price of the end product dictate the performance that customer will buy. That might sound somewhat obvious — but again, it hasn’t always been this way, especially recently.

The only subtle wrinkle to Intel’s chip lineup is that not all of the Lunar Lake chips will be Copilot+ capable, which is a slight surprise. Instead, some of the slower Lunar Lake processors dip below 45 TOPS, which has been the informal dividing line between what is a Copilot+ PC and what isn’t. Intel is still tweaking the NPU by adjusting the frequency and the number of NPU units, producing the Core Ultra 7 258V (47 TOPS) and the Core Ultra 7 266V (48 TOPS). It just won’t tell us what it’s doing. (I asked.)

Intel’s prior Core Ultra processor, Meteor Lake, shipped on Dec. 14, 2023, after Intel discussed the Meteor Lake architecture and announced its clock speeds and model names, too. But there was one key issue: Yes, the 14th-gen Core Ultra chips ushered in the AI PC — but without sufficient TOPS to let them be used as a Copilot+ PC.

Inside Intel’s newest Core Ultra, Lunar Lake

Intel’s Lunar Lake chip changes in a few significant ways from its earlier chips. (For those of you who have been following our earlier coverage and wish to jump ahead to how performance differs, please do so. Otherwise, this section will recap some of the key features of the Lunar Lake architecture, using more details of the Xe2 GPU as a transition into performance.)

As referenced above, the key adjustment from a laptop perspective is Intel’s decision to build in the system DRAM inside the chip package itself. We’ve become used to PCs shipping with RAM slots, which can be upgraded with more memory over time. Laptops also include this feature — but fewer are internally accessible, and some laptops come with memory soldered to the motherboard itself. Intel is betting that those of you buying productivity laptops with Lunar Lake chips inside won’t care about upgrading the memory, and that either 16GB or 32GB will be sufficient.

Further reading: Intel’s Lunar Lake laptops won’t let you upgrade your RAM, and that’s fine

Otherwise, Intel has continued down the path of aggressively reducing power. While Meteor Lake introduced efficiency (E-cores) and low-power E-cores, Lunar Lake’s E-cores are simply all E-cores, if that makes sense. Lunar Lake’s E-core performance is basically double that of Meteor Lake, Intel executives have said. And, given that there are four E-cores in Lunar Lake, versus two low-power E-cores in Meteor Lake, you might say (as Intel does) that multithreaded E-core performance has almost quadrupled in a generation’s time.

And then there’s one of the more higher-profile changes: no more hyperthreading. For decades now, Intel’s Core chips have been able to run two threads per processor core, increasing performance. But Intel has said eliminating the SMT feature helps Intel optimize for performance per watt and performance per area — and that’s the overarching mantra for Lunar Lake.

AI, of course, is one of the key thrusts for Intel and its competitors. How important it is an interesting question, especially because AI encompasses both AI processing in the cloud (such as Google Gemini, or Microsoft Copilot) and the on-chip AI processing that chipmakers love to talk about.

How much the onboard NPU will be used isn’t really clear. But what Intel’s marketing team cares most about is that the “NPU4” core now produces up to 48 TOPS, meaning that laptop makers can now add a Copilot+ sticker (and its related Windows features) to Lunar Lake laptops.

Finally, Lunar Lake has added what Intel calls the ‘Xe2″ GPU, the long-awaited variant that should show up in the upcoming discrete “Battlemage” graphics cards for desktops. Our earlier story goes into more detail about the actual architecture of the Xe2 GPU, including the updated ray-tracing unit, the eight 512-bit vector engines and the eight 2,048-bit Xe Matrix Extension engines.

What’s new here is what Intel wouldn’t tell us before, including the clock speeds and memory. The Lunar Lake product matrix reveals that you’ll be able to choose from an Xe2 GPU with either 7 or 8 Xe2 cores, with clock speeds ranging from 1.85GHz to 2.05GHz. While it’s not a perfect metric, TOPS is also helpful to understand the range of GPU performance. The slowest Ultra 5 226V chip produces 53 TOPS between its CPU/GPU/NPU, while the fastest Core Ultra 9 288V produces 67 TOPS.

How fast is Lunar Lake? Here’s what Intel says

So how fast is Intel’s Lunar Lake chip? That might not be the right question. Qualcomm has been earning praise for its power-sipping Snapdragon chips. AMD’s mobile Ryzens have aimed mainly at performance. And Intel? They’re trying to cut power without giving up a strong legacy of processing performance.

“I’m sure I sound a bit like a broken record, but Lunar Lake is all about energy efficiency,” Hallock said. Lunar Lake was conceived as a 9W CPU, but “OEMs wanted more,” he said. So Intel pushed higher, pushing the total TDP options up to 35W.

Intel cut the Lunar Lake package power by 30 percent, but made each thread much more efficient — each processor thread in Lunar Lake is two to three times more powerful than Meteor Lake. Put another way, Intel believes that the Core Ultra 9 288V cuts power by 34 to 50 percent versus the Intel Core Ultra 7 165H (Meteor Lake) in terms of web browsing and productivity apps; in games, it cuts power by 11 to 35 percent while performance soars to 68 percent.

Intel also believes that it is far more efficient than Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite, too. Lunar Lake delivers comparable performance to the Snapdragon X Elite at 40 percent lower power, with four fewer cores, Hallock claimed.

Intel clearly feels that has the goods to lead in terms of power and battery life, and leaned on the benchmarks to prove it — the company showed off many more benchmarks than I could fit in this article. We’ve included a representative sample, however.

Intel said that it worked with an unnamed PC laptop maker, who plans to release the same laptop using both a Snapdragon X Elite as well as a Core Ultra variant, with the only differences coming in the motherboard and processor. That’s proof, executives said, that the Core Ultra can top the Snapdragon in a head-to-head test.

In that example, the notebook with the Intel Core Ultra 7 268V outlasted the same notebook with the Qualcomm X1E-80-100 inside it, 20.1 hours to 18.1 hours, running the PCMark Procyon Office test. (Qualcomm emerged victorious over the course of a marathon Teams call, 12.7 hours versus 10.7 hours.) In the graphic above, the PC maker shipped a Ryzen notebook, too, but only in a larger size.

Intel’s Core Ultra didn’t run ragged over Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite in terms of AI, generating a score of 1,828 in the UL Procyon AI benchmark, very close to the score of 1,792 Qualcomm originally produced last year. Intel’s belief is that more and more software developers will try to use the different parts of a mobile SOC — the CPU, GPU, and NPU — in a combined effort. That future isn’t here yet, either, though.

However, Intel did use specialized AI benchmarks, such as those found in Adobe Premiere and Lightroom, to indicate that it was leading in AI, too. In Lightroom, for example, Intel claimed that its Ultra 9 288V could outperform the Qualcomm X1E-78-100 by 145 percent in AI denoising.

Intel also ran several “live” demos, in which games like DOTA 2 were looped on comparable machines to show off how well Lunar Lake performed. Intel executives also pushed the button to launch several demos on their own captive hardware. In live demos (at 1080p, Medium settings, with XeSS enabled) Lunar Lake laptops hit playable 60ish and 70ish frame rates in Cyberpunk: 2077 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. We have to take every benchmark that we didn’t run ourselves with a grain of salt, though they’re more convincing than just a PowerPoint slide.

To be fair, Intel’s handpicked benchmarks are…handpicked. And Qualcomm clearly has Intel nervous, as company executives zeroed in on its competitor to the south. Intel, of course, has programs like Intel Evo, the co-engineering program with PC makers that it says it will continue and expand to improve cool and quiet testing.

Intel still faces thousands of potential layoffs as well as cost cuts. Intel sources I spoke to say that those decisions haven’t been made yet. Carla Rodriguez, an Intel vice president responsible for ecosystem enablement, says that Intel has no plans to cut its co-engineering and marketing programs. Intel also reiterated that Lunar Lake isn’t subject to the “Vmin” voltage issue that affected its desktop processors.

Intel does advantages: its dominant position, and its breakneck pace. Intel will ship both Lunar Lake and Meteor Lake in the time its rivals have shipped one architecture. Whether Intel can live up to its claims, though, will be put to the test as soon as we can test the Core Ultra Series 2 / Lunar Lake for ourselves.